How to paste a tab into OS X Terminal from clipboard?

If you just need to insert a tab, you can press control-v and tab.

To temporarily allow pasting tabs in bash, run:

bind '"\t":self-insert'

If you're pasting text to emacs, you can use a function like this instead of command-v:

(defun pbpaste ()
  (interactive)
  (shell-command-on-region
    (point)
    (if mark-active (mark) (point))
    "pbpaste" nil t))